Some things that I am learning about twice exceptional kids.

Twice exceptional. 2E. That’s what kids who are gifted and have a learning disability are called. I know all about gifted kids. Dearie is a gifted kid. It has been a challenge to raise and educate her, but she reminds me a lot of me and that makes it easier. I am beginning to think that Honey is 2E. She is very smart, but sometimes she just doesn’t ‘get’ stuff. Today we were playing a math game. We were playing with 3 dice that have numbers up to 6 on them, and she had to add up the three numbers to find out how far to move. Several times she rolled numbers that worked out to 3+4. After about 3 or 4 of these rolls, she started answering them with out figuring out the answer. I thought to myself that she was getting this fact down. Cool! Then her sisters came over and wanted to play. That sounded like fun to everyone, so they joined us. 3+4 came up again and she was clueless. I suspect it was the chaos that comes from having 3 kids playing a crazy board game. She seems to need a lot of review to get these things down.

One of the things that I have just read about is how visual kids (Honey will tell you that she thinks in pictures) miss out on language practice because they think in pictures not words. Kiddo thinks in words. She often thinks outloud. It can drive a person crazy! But Honey doesn’t do this, so maybe she is not getting as much practice at language as a kid who thinks in words. I do think that it helps that she has sisters to play and talk with. It is not like she is a quiet child.

Another thing that was an Ahh Ha moment for me has to do with 2E kids. Gifted kids often learn that everything academic is easy. So much so that they really don’t learn how to learn. This is why Dearie is in advanced classes. I want her to have to work to learn (it isn’t really working though, learning is so easy for her). 2E kids on the other hand learn that if it doesn’t come easily, then they can just forget it. It will be too hard. Everything is either too easy or too hard. This describes Honey perfectly. She has learned that if it doesn’t come easy that it is better to just give up. Looking back I can see this in several areas. In fact, I have encouraged it in some ways. Learning is supposed to be easy. It is for Dearie and Kiddo. If it is not easy, then I would just wait awhile hoping that later it would come easily. But some things, such as reading and memorizing math facts, have never been easy for Honey. They probably never will be. She will have to work hard in order to learn them. She can do this, I am sure, but it won’t be easy. On the other hand, I think that learning how to work hard to learn things is a life lesson worth learning. I am trying hard to teach it to Dearie and Kiddo. Honey will just learn it just from being who she is.

I am so glad that we homeschool. We started homeschooling because I wanted Dearie to be challenged, not just skate through school. And once we started, it was clear that homeschooling was a good fit for our family. Homeschooling has turned out to be very good for Honey. If she were in school, I but that she would be flying under the wire. She is so good at making you think that she knows stuff that she doesn’t. She can read books by looking at the pictures and guessing from the context. It is really amazing how well she can do. And yet, if you ask her to read a nonsense word, she has no clue. If you ask her to read words out of context, forget it, she just can’t. If she did not have one on one instruction, I’m not sure that her problems would have been caught so early.